As interest in blockchain reaches a fever pitch, organizations are aggressively building their first projects and seriously thinking about how they will begin testing and using blockchain more broadly. While the blockchain concept first appeared in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, as an immutable record of transactions, maintained collaboratively by all parties that hold and trade the currency, I personally believe it has profound, disruptive implications for a range of settings, from finance, banking, IoT, healthcare, supply chains, manufacturing, technology, government, and the legal system, and more.

On the heels of today's announcement that IBM is offering a new framework and cloud services to help organizations understand how to create secure cloud environments for blockchain, I thought I would share some insights from a cryptographers perspective, about the true innovation behind the technology.